Chapter 18

Of our wanderings in the great swamp I have no clear
knowledge. When I strive to remember, I have a riot of
unrelated impressions and a loss of time-value. I have
no idea of how long we were in that vast everglade, but
it must have been for weeks. My memories of what
occurred invariably take the form of nightmare. For
untold ages, oppressed by protean fear, I am aware of
wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and
soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us,
and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under
us and sucked at our heels.

I know that we were turned from our course countless
times by streams and lakes and slimy seas. Then there
were storms and risings of the water over great areas
of the low-lying lands; and there were periods of
hunger and misery when we were kept prisoners in the
trees for days and days by these transient floods.

Very strong upon me is one picture. Large trees are
about us, and from their branches hang gray filaments
of moss, while great creepers, like monstrous serpents,
curl around the trunks and writhe in tangles through
the air. And all about is the mud, soft mud, that
bubbles forth gases, and that heaves and sighs with
internal agitations. And in the midst of all this are
a dozen of us. We are lean and wretched, and our bones
show through our tight-stretched skins. We do not sing
and chatter and laugh. We play no pranks. For once
our volatile and exuberant spirits are hopelessly
subdued. We make plaintive, querulous noises, look at
one another, and cluster close together. It is like
the meeting of the handful of survivors after the day
of the end of the world.

This event is without connection with the other events
in the swamp. How we ever managed to cross it, I do
not know, but at last we came out where a low range of
hills ran down to the bank of the river. It was our
river emerging like ourselves from the great swamp. On
the south bank, where the river had broken its way
through the hills, we found many sand-stone caves.
Beyond, toward the west, the ocean boomed on the bar
that lay across the river's mouth. And here, in the
caves, we settled down in our abiding-place by the sea.

There were not many of us. From time to time, as the
days went by, more of the Folk appeared. They dragged
themselves from the swamp singly, and in twos and
threes, more dead than alive, mere perambulating
skeletons, until at last there were thirty of us. Then
no more came from the swamp, and Red-Eye was not among
us. It was noticeable that no children had survived the
frightful journey.

I shall not tell in detail of the years we lived by the
sea. It was not a happy abiding-place. The air was
raw and chill, and we suffered continually from
coughing and colds. We could not survive in such an
environment. True, we had children; but they had
little hold on life and died early, while we died
faster than new ones were born. Our number steadily
diminished.

Then the radical change in our diet was not good for
us. We got few vegetables and fruits, and became
fish-eaters. There were mussels and abalones and clams
and rock-oysters, and great ocean-crabs that were
thrown upon the beaches in stormy weather. Also, we
found several kinds of seaweed that were good to eat.
But the change in diet caused us stomach troubles, and
none of us ever waxed fat. We were all lean and
dyspeptic-looking. It was in getting the big abalones
that Lop-Ear was lost. One of them closed upon his
fingers at low-tide, and then the flood-tide came in
and drowned him. We found his body the next day, and
it was a lesson to us. Not another one of us was ever
caught in the closing shell of an abalone.

The Swift One and I managed to bring up one child, a
boy--at least we managed to bring him along for several
years. But I am quite confident he could never have
survived that terrible climate. And then, one day, the
Fire People appeared again. They had come down the
river, not on a catamaran, but in a rude dug-out.
There were three of them that paddled in it, and one of
them was the little wizened old hunter. They landed on
our beach, and he limped across the sand and examined
our caves.

They went away in a few minutes, but the Swift One was
badly scared. We were all frightened, but none of us
to the extent that she was. She whimpered and cried
and was restless all that night. In the morning she
took the child in her arms, and by sharp cries,
gestures, and example, started me on our second long
flight. There were eight of the Folk (all that was left
of the horde) that remained behind in the caves. There
was no hope for them. Without doubt, even if the Fire
People did not return, they must soon have perished.
It was a bad climate down there by the sea. The Folk
were not constituted for the coast-dwelling life.

We travelled south, for days skirting the great swamp
but never venturing into it. Once we broke back to the
westward, crossing a range of mountains and coming down
to the coast. But it was no place for us. There were
no trees--only bleak headlands, a thundering surf, and
strong winds that seemed never to cease from blowing.
We turned back across the mountains, travelling east
and south, until we came in touch with the great swamp
again.

Soon we gained the southern extremity of the swamp, and
we continued our course south and east. It was a
pleasant land. The air was warm, and we were again in
the forest. Later on we crossed a low-lying range of
hills and found ourselves in an even better forest
country. The farther we penetrated from the coast the
warmer we found it, and we went on and on until we came
to a large river that seemed familiar to the Swift One.
It was where she must have come during the four years'
absence from the harde. This river we crossed on logs,
landing on side at the large bluff. High up on the
bluff we found our new home most difficult of access
and quite hidden from any eye beneath.

There is little more of my tale to tell. Here the
Swift One and I lived and reared our family. And here
my memories end. We never made another migration. I
never dream beyond our high, inaccessible cave. And
here must have been born the child that inherited the
stuff of my dreams, that had moulded into its being all
the impressions of my life--or of the life of
Big-Tooth, rather, who is my other-self, and not my
real self, but who is so real to me that often I am
unable to tell what age I am living in.

I often wonder about this line of descent. I, the
modern, am incontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the
primitive, am not a man. Somewhere, and by straight
line of descent, these two parties to my dual
personality were connected. Were the Folk, before
their destruction, in the process of becoming men? And
did I and mine carry through this process? On the other
hand, may not some descendant of mine have gone in to
the Fire People and become one of them? I do not know.
There is no way of learning. One thing only is
certain, and that is that Big-Tooth did stamp into the
cerebral constitution of one of his progeny all the
impressions of his life, and stamped them in so
indelibly that the hosts of intervening generations
have failed to obliterate them.

There is one other thing of which I must speak before I
close. It is a dream that I dream often, and in point
of time the real event must have occurred during the
period of my living in the high, inaccessible cave. I
remember that I wandered far in the forest toward the
east. There I came upon a tribe of Tree People. I
crouched in a thicket and watched them at play. They
were holding a laughing council, jumping up and down
and screeching rude choruses.

Suddenly they hushed their noise and ceased their
capering. They shrank down in fear, and quested
anxiously about with their eyes for a way of retreat.
Then Red-Eye walked in among them. They cowered away
from him. All were frightened. But he made no attempt
to hurt them. He was one of them. At his heels, on
stringy bended legs, supporting herself with knuckles
to the ground on either side, walked an old female of
the Tree People, his latest wife. He sat down in the
midst of the circle. I can see him now, as I write
this, scowling, his eyes inflamed, as he peers about
him at the circle of the Tree People. And as he peers
he crooks one monstrous leg and with his gnarly toes
scratches himself on the stomach. He is Red-Eye, the
atavism.